Coure Inforamtion

Organization

Course Materials

• Pong P. Chu, FPGA Prototyping by VHDL Examples: Xilinx MicroBlaze MCS SoC, Wiley, Oct. 2017. (Required)
• Stephen Brown and Zvonko Vranesic, Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design, McGraw-Hill, 3rd Edition, 2008. (Supplementary for Basics)
• Ricardo Jasinski, Effective Coding with VHDL: Principles and Best Practice, The MIT Press; 1st Edition, 2016. (Supplementary for Advanced)
• ChatGPT

Lecture

Schedule and Documents

[Syllabi]

Readings

Lab

Tools for Lab

Software

• Xilinx Vivado
• Xilinx Vitis
• Instructions on how to install Xilinx Vivado

Hardware

• Digilent Basys 3 Artix-7 FPGA Trainer Board
• Digilent Basys 3 FPGA Board Reference Manual
• Digilent Adept
• Artix-7 FPGA Family
• 7 Series FPGAs Overview

General Laboratory Rules

• Each lab assignment will be preceded by an introduction and a hands-on session taught by a TA.

• Selected lab sessions will include lab exercises aimed at helping you to prepare for the actual lab assignments. Solutions to lab exercises submitted using Blackboard and demonstrated before the end of the lab session will be rewarded with 25% bonus points. The remaining students can submit lab exercise deliverables by the specific time in the lab documents. In this case, only a video demonstration is required.

• The deadline for submitting all lab assignment deliverables (including source code, diagrams, waveforms, configuration files, lab reports, video demonstrations, etc.) is specified in the lab documents.

• Students will be required to demonstrate a working experiment during the first lab session after the given assignment is due. Demonstrations will also be accepted during the TA office hours preceding this lab session.

• Each lab assignment that is one week late will be penalized by deducting 1/4 of its allocated points. No credit will be received for a lab experiment that is more than one week late. Opportunities will be provided to earn bonus points by completing additional tasks for each assignment.

• Students who do well in Labs 1-4 can sign up for Schedule A+. This schedule will involve working on an open-ended project proposed by the students, the TA, or the instructor. The project can be done individually or in groups of two students. The schedule of the project must include the following steps:

  • specification - 1 week
  • milestone 1 - 2 weeks
  • milestone 2 - 2 weeks
  • final report & deliverables - 1 week.

• Office hours will be devoted to helping students with their designs and answering any questions related to the subject of the course.

• Students are required to work individually on most assignments unless group work is clearly stated in the text of the assignment. In the case of group work, all members of the team are expected to be intimately familiar with the entire solution to the given lab assignment and the entire lab report. This knowledge will be verified during the demonstration, and the same grade will be applied to the entire team.

• It is the student’s responsibility to convince the TA that their designs work as required. Therefore, students have to simulate and test their designs thoroughly and well document their work. The TA is not required to test anything by himself nor to investigate if the designs are correct in case of insufficient documentation.

• In order to prevent cheating and plagiarism, the students will be required to submit all electronic deliverables using Blackboard at the designated time before the experiment demonstration,

  • restrain from any changes in the experiment files in the period between the electronic submission and the experiment demonstration,
  • answer several detailed questions regarding their solution at the time of demonstration.
  • Not complying with either of these requirements may lead to either a total rejection of the demonstration by the TA or to a substantial reduction of the number of points awarded to the student.

• In case of any evident attempt to submit somebody else’s work as your own, both students involved in the incident may be penalized by taking away all points for the given lab assignment. The two repeated attempts to present somebody else’s work as your own may lead to an F grade for the entire course, independently of the total amount of points earned by the student before the second incident.

• The students are encouraged to help and support each other in all problems related to the

  • operation of the CAD tools,
  • operation of the FPGA boards,
  • operation of the measurement equipment available in the lab,
  • understanding of the problem to be solved during each experiment.

Lab Schedule

Plesae refer to Blackboard.